THROUGH THE YEARS WITH ...HERB HILL : ‘The Dean’ Extends Streak to 25 Seasons as Coach of Loara High Football

In the past few years, Herb Hill of Loara High School has begun to be referred to as “The Dean” of Orange County football coaches.

If that unofficial title were based only on longevity at one school, Hill, 55, would win the honor hands down.

He began working for Loara in 1962, running football practices among the palm trees in La Palma Park before construction on the new school was completed.

Tonight, Hill enters the first league game of his 25th season at Loara against highly ranked Esperanza in Bradford Stadium. But to imply that vintage is all that makes Herb Hill The Dean would be as misleading as to suggest that royal lineage was what made John Wayne “The Duke.”

Hill’s status stems from much more than a tall stack of yellowing football programs from autumns past. It’s really a mark of respect for a person who has demonstrated integrity and success.

Consider the scope of his past successes. His record at Loara is 154-86-7, a .641 percentage.

Hill’s Saxon teams won the CIF 3-A title in 1968 and the Southern Conference title in 1979. They have won nine league championships.

The Saxons have rarely been graced with a wealth of size or exceptional athletic talent, and in recent years, they have had fewer players than most of their Empire League opponents. Nonetheless, the Saxons have qualified for the playoffs 12 times.

Only two of his 24 Saxon teams have finished lower than fourth place. Apart from an interruption as a Crestview League member in 1966, Loara enjoyed five glory years in the Irvine League in 1964-1965 and 1967-1969. The Saxons never lost an Irvine League game (although they were tied by Fountain Valley once) and compiled a 30-0-1 record before being lifted into the Sunset League in 1970.

On Hill’s left hand is a weathered ring in the shape of a gold football that he received after coaching the South team to victory in the 1966 statewide Shrine game. The next season, he guided an underdog North team to a 49-6 victory in the Orange County All-Star game.

He doesn’t know exactly when the mantle of Orange County dean was passed to him, but he wears it comfortably and with a lack of pretension.

“I don’t know who it was before,” he said. “Maybe we didn’t have one for a while, although of course (Anaheim Coach) Clare VanHoorebeke was.”

Who first began calling Hill The Dean?

“My ‘friends,’ ” he said with a chuckle. “As long as they don’t bury me, it doesn’t bother me. I just let it go in one ear and out the other and keep doing what we’re doing.”

You could describe Hill as old-fashioned in the best sense of the word, but he certainly is not over the hill. Consider his current team.

As usual, the Saxons don’t have any players whose names are likely to be recognized outside a five-block radius of the school. But the Saxons are one of only two teams in the Southern Section that have opened the season with three straight shutouts. They beat Western, 3-0, Anaheim, 24-0, and Canyon, 28-0.

That’s a first even for Hill, who emphasizes defense--but not necessarily shutouts. He said he prefers to give his second- and third-stringers the chance to play rather than go for the shutout by leaving in the first unit.

“If you’re up by two or three touchdowns and you don’t let them play, a kid could get a pretty bleak outlook on life,” Hill said.

And what’s the secret of this team?

“I’m trying to figure that out,” he said, laughing. “We’ve gotten a little bit better each week, which was necessary because we started off with a very poor offensive performance. Our line is just figuring out who they’re supposed to block and such, although the defense has played well from the start. If we could maintain that, it would be wonderful.”

Hill was born in Santa Ana, the son of former city councilman and clothing store owner Herb Hill Sr. He attended Santa Ana High and played two seasons of football at Santa Ana College, where he was a lineman on the junior Rose Bowl team of 1949.

He continued his football career and education at Occidental College and returned to Orange County to start his coaching career as an assistant at Garden Grove High in 1953. He moved to the head coach’s position at Rancho Alamitos in 1956 and later spent two seasons as an assistant to Steve Musso at Orange Coast.

His first Loara team lost just one Inland League game in 1962, and he guided other teams to five championships in four leagues in the first eight years of the school.

“He was like a father to me,” said Harvey Winn, one of the best-known former Saxons. Winn was Loara quarterback in 1966 and 1967 before going on to the University of Oregon, where he backed up Dan Fouts and led the Ducks to an upset of USC in the Coliseum in 1971.

“(Playing for him) was a great experience for me,” said Winn, now a lumber broker in Oregon. “I was real lucky to play under Coach Hill. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

“He really cared about his kids and he always treated everyone fairly. You learned to give your best on every play, and that the team was more important than any individual. . . . He surrounded himself with excellent assistant coaches and he instilled an excellent work ethic in his kids.”

Hill and his assistants played a major role in the life of Bob Wendt, a Saxon lineman in 1968 and 1969. When Wendt married another Loara graduate eight years after graduating, Hill and assistant Gib Dear attended the wedding.

Wendt explained: “Loara was always on a pedestal to us. All through junior high, for me and all my friends, our only goal was to play football for Herb Hill. Anything he said, we did.

“We responded because we were scared to death of them (the coaching staff),” said Wendt, who became an all-league lineman. “We had no idea why we were doing all these drills at the time, but when I got to Fullerton Junior College I realized that I was so far ahead of the other kids I played against, and it was because (the Loara coaches) had taught us such solid fundamental techniques.”

Wendt, who still lives so close to Loara that his back fence touches the school’s property, remembers how the football team’s rules covered even its members’ speech and hair styles. The crew cut was required and no one dared answer Hill with “nope.”

“In the spring of your sophomore year, they had these team meetings and there was no such thing as ‘Yeah,’ ‘uh-uh’ or ‘maybe,’ ” Wendt said. “There was no slang. If the coaches asked you a question it was: ‘Yes, sir!’ These rules were imposed on us and you realized later it was the reason you stayed together as a team.”

His players also remember Hill’s private gestures of kindness. When Manny Valdez moved from Arizona to Anaheim as a junior in 1966, he wanted to meet friends by trying out for the football team, but he had never played football and his mother didn’t have the money to buy equipment.

He remembers being called into Hill’s office at the end of the first week of practice.

“I went out for the first practice and there were 50 or 60 guys out there and I was the only one who didn’t own a pair of football shoes,” said Valdez, an aerospace manufacturing specialist. “I was out there slipping and sliding around in regular tennis shoes when he called me in.

“I didn’t know whether he was going to say, ‘We’ve seen enough of you. Why don’t you take a hike?’ or what.”

Instead, Hill instructed Valdez to go down to the sporting goods store and pick out a pair of cleats. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about the cost,’ ” said Valdez, who never found out where the money came from for his first football shoes. Although he didn’t play enough to letter his junior season, the next year he was named an all-league defensive tackle and an Orange County All-Star, and the Saxons were Irvine League champions.

“He always gave so much of himself,” Valdez said. “He never belittled anybody. He made you feel like part of the team, from the stars all the way down to the people like myself, who rarely played. He said: ‘We’re one team here and I want everybody to have the same opportunities.’ ”

Loara’s opponents may wonder when Hill will retire. He answers the question simply.

“When it’s not any fun anymore,” he said. “It’s not difficult to be enthusiastic on a Friday night; it’s the Monday afternoons (after 14-hour weekend days looking at films) and times like that when we have to fire ourselves up. I don’t think I’ll want to do it much after I’m 60.”

Then that game look comes into his eye, as it has 247 times in the past quarter century at Loara, and The Dean smiles. “. . . But maybe I will.”

HERB HILL’S RECORD AT LOARA

1962 5-1-2 1963 4-5-0 1964* 9-2-0 1965* 11-1-0 1966 5-4-0 1967* 8-2-1 1968* 13-0-0 1969* 8-1-1 1970 5-3-1 1971 5-4-0 1972 3-6-0 1973 6-3-0 1974 4-5-0 1975 3-6-0 1976* 5-4-1 1977* 6-4-0 1978 3-6-1 1979* 12-2-0 1980* 8-3-0 1981 4-6-0 1982 6-5-0 1983 5-5-0 1984 6-5-0 1985 7-3-0 1986 3-0-0 TOTAL 154-86-7

*--indicates league title